Glendale Dentists, Aspirin, and Folic Acid

View 734 Wednesday, July 25, 2012

I got bogged down in details and a sudden lack of energy. I’m getting back in gear again.

I was talking to a friend today who is a bit worried that her husband is showing some signs of what might be Parkinson’s, but the doctors aren’t sure. That got me to thinking. I have anecdotal evidence – anecdotal, nothing provable – from some physician friends that vitamin D deficiencies can bring on symptoms like Parkinson’s.

Of course you can overdose on D, but a vitamin D supplement costs not much, and indeed is generally packaged with calcium if you’re taking calcium supplements. A good multi-vitamin contains D, and everyone probably ought to have a daily multi-vitamin given the screwy eating habits that most Americans have.

That got me thinking about the huge pile of pills I take every day. I have a lot of them, and I seem to be able to keep going even though I’m getting damn near eighty – and I see a lot of people much younger than me who seem to act and feel older. Of course I am pretty sure that much of the stuff I take is probably making expensive urine – but something keeps me going, even after my 50,000 rad treatment.

Many years ago I had a dentist friend in Glendale who told me about another dentist in Glendale who had the theory that his patients who took aspirin regularly had fewer strokes and heart attacks. That of course is anecdotal evidence par excellence, which is what I said when I wrote about it in the 1970’s. The medical profession did not take these Glendale dentists seriously, but eventually big Med did pay attention and did some real studies. Now we know more about aspirin and heart attacks and strokes. I suppose my experience in that has made me a little less convinced that the medical establishment knows quite as much as it is convinced it knows.

I also know that the FDA was overly cautious about the amount of folic acid – folate – that women ought to be taking before and just after conception, and what they recommended was just enough to prevent pernicious anemia. The result was at least one case of a damaged baby which may or may not be traceable to folate deficiency at time of impregnation. The stuff is cheap, and it’s hard to overdose on it, and my advice to any woman contemplating pregnancy is to make sure they get enough folic acid, and by enough I mean multiples of the recommended dosage. But that’s just my suggestion, and you do what you want to do.

I am often asked what I take, and I’ve always been a bit reluctant to write about it. I’m not in the business of giving that kind of advice, and I don’t claim any expertise, just a lot of collected anecdotes. I can say that I’d rather have expensive urine than some of the problems I have seen. I do recommend that you look into not just conventional vitamin supplements with anti-oxidants – my sometime Tomorrow Show companion Durk Pearson has written a lot about that , and the Life Extension Foundation has a big literature about their “Life Extension Formula” – and Jim Baen did enough research into the stuff called SAMe to convince me that I should pay for it even though it ain’t all that cheap. And CoQ10 is worth looking. Phosphydital Serine is another. Greg Benford has me on some stuff that is supposed to stimulate stem cell generation. And I could go one with more which would convince you that I’m probably out of my mind. But the whole mess doesn’t cost me that much each month, and I do think that some of what’s in the witches’ brew is helping.

And that’s probably enough rambling on that.

They’re rioting in Anaheim. In theory the riots are supposed to be protests about the Anaheim police, but most of the rioters don’t live in Anaheim, and the stores that get looted have nothing to do with the police. Somehow we can spend billions to rebuild Afghanistan – a task that Alexander the Great wouldn’t undertake even though he certainly did rebuild the Persian and Egyptian civilizations – but we cannot protect the freedom of a Starbucks franchise owner to have a store near Disneyland.

I do not believe any country on earth could invade the United States. No one can take a drink from the Mississippi without out let and leave. Yet the United States has millions of illegal aliens and we seem unable to do anything about that. Our army is busy ensuring that the Mayor of Kabul’s writ runs through Afghanistan. We aren’t very good at that, and many Afghani’s prefer the Taliban to Kabul. Pakistan has always been more afraid of India than of Afghanistan, and someone in the State Department must know this, but I am not sure that those who control our foreign policy know it. Bush sent the most incompetent proconsul Iraq had seen in two thousand years. We’re leaving that ‘nation’ in a state of chaos. When we went into Iraq I asked what we would do to build a ‘nation’ out of three provinces of the Turkish Empire. They were three provinces for a good reason. The monarchy imposed by the West on “Iraq” came from Mecca and were given Iraq and Jordan because the Hashemites – hereditary Protectors of Mecca – had received promises during World War One. Faisal was proclaimed King of Syria, but that didn’t work, so he became King of Iraq. That lasted until the Baathists overthrew him and after a bit of turmoil Saddam Hussein emerged. He held the three provinces together. Now the President of Iraq has put out a warrant to arrest the Vice President who has taken refuge in the Kurdish province where Bagdad’s writ doesn’t run.

No one can invade us, but I am subjected to ridiculous procedures in order to board an airplane. It’s a strange world.